Having been pleased with XAMPP on windows for some time, I am exploring making the move to Linux.

I have got XAMPP setup, as per the instructions, but I am curious:

On my kubuntu linux box, the /opt directory in which I have installed XAMPP (as per instructions) is only writeable by root. Is this intentional ?
Not being familiar with the directory structure (please is there a "unix directories for dummies article out there ?") I don't know what the /opt folder is for. Does it matter if I change the folder to something not so protected ? Of course, protection is good for a production webserver, but it's inconvenient in a non production environment.

2nd question - is there, by any change, a nice XAMPP GUI upcoming, like the win32 XAMPP GUI ?

Thanks to all you guys out there who made this great software possible - and Germany for the cup ! (does flattery get me a quick reply I wonder )

i havent tried this but .. theoretically XAMPP can be installed anywhere ..even in your home directory .. it should work fine. or else you can leave the installation as such and change path in http.conf to new document root directory.

i think /opt direcotry means optional directory ...

i can understand it being inconvenient to write to a directory with root permissions .. but u can launch text editor or Quanta using sudo command on ur Kuduntu ... its lot more easier than messing with path and changing installation directory !! ..

i just installed xampp on my new fedora (linux) machine.
it seems i can only access the status page of the xampp configuration page when my firewall is turned off.
i have mysql port 3306 accepted.
what other ports will i need to enable to have access to this page and full functionality of xampp?

i just installed xampp on my new fedora (linux) machine.it seems i can only access the status page of the xampp configuration page when my firewall is turned off.i have mysql port 3306 accepted.what other ports will i need to enable to have access to this page and full functionality of xampp?